Surround yourself with Yuzen Birodo paintings

Blythe vacation rentals

How the Japanese describe Yuzen-Birodo

The label on the back of one of my Japanese cut-velvet paintings, called Yuzen Birodo, is from Sozayemon Nishimura, "How the Well-Known YUZEN-BIRODO or CUT-VELVET is made:

The Yuzen-Birodo, better known as Cut-Velvet is not a painted work as it appears to be. The Pictoral affect produced thereon is obtained by a special process of dyeing invented by the artist Yuzen who flourished in the latter part of the 17th century, hence the name Yuzen Dyeing. In course of weaving the fabric, the slender metallic wires running parallel with the woof, become covered with the threads. The required patterns and designs are dyed into the fabric thus produced, by the Yuzen process: the colors obtained being quite durable. When the dyeing is finished, each thread covering the wires woven into the texture, is carefully cut over the picture produced, while the ground of the fabric is left plain without the cutting. The wires are then extracted and the work is completed.

Basically, dyed areas are cut from loops into velvet pile, giving a variable texture across the hand-dyed fabric. No two are alike. The "velvet" is very subtle. Please email raoverton@yahoo.com if you know more.........

Gail

The art of Japanese velvet painting or "Yuzen Birodo"

I came across my first Japanese velvet painting in a small antique shop in Maine. A type of corduroy fabric with fine horizontal lines, but noticed that the lines had been "cut" into a velvet texture in places where trees, rocks, boats etc. were. Had no idea what this was, but purchased it for a modest $10. It wasn't until I won a Herron swooping through some branches in a Pennsylvania auction that I noticed it too was made in the same style: Classic Meiji Japanese painting with muted colors and exceptional artistic talent. The unsigned works would grow into a collection of some 50-odd paintings of all talent levels (tourist art to museum pieces), long before I even found the "Yuzen Birodo" or Japanese cut-velvet painting label on the back of one piece.

It was then that I was able to learn much more about this fascinating art. The label on the back of a landscape read, "How the Well-Known YUZEN-BIRODO, or CUT-VELVET, is made" Inventor and manufacturer: Sozayemon Nishimura, Kioto, Japan. The label goes on to describe the art; more of that in my next blog. From what I've been able to gather, this art is also called "Senkiri" and I sure would like to find out more about it's origins. Whether or not Nishimura was the inventor, I do not know. Those stores in Kioto were around in the 1920s when much of this art was made, but tales go back to the 1840s for some of the pieces I've acquired. Please email me at raoverton@yahoo.com if you know anything about YUZEN BIRODO.

Cheers,

Gail Overton